Opening Address

From Heirs to System Architects: Building Asia’s Legacy Flywheels for Global Good

WMI Asia Centre for Changemakers Session

Philanthropy Asia Summit, Singapore

20 May 2026

 

Opening

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.

It is my pleasure to welcome you to this session hosted by WMI’s Asia Centre for Changemakers.

Our theme today is From Heirs to System Architects: Building Asia’s Legacy Flywheels for Global Good.

 

It captures a question that more and more families across Asia are now asking with urgency.

 

How do we prepare the next generation, not only to inherit, but to build. Not only to preserve, but to renew. And not only to protect the family’s own success, but to turn that success into enduring good beyond the family itself.

 

Across this region, we are living through one of the most significant intergenerational transfers of wealth and leadership in our history. McKinsey estimates that around US$6 trillion will be transferred in Asia by 2030.

 

Much has been said about the mechanics of succession. The trust structures, the family constitution, the tax planning, the investment vehicles. All of that matters.

 

We are operating in a world shaped by geopolitical fragmentation. Tensions can escalate quickly. Jurisdictions once considered stable or neutral can become exposed. A distant conflict can move oil prices, shift currencies, and disrupt supply chains.

 

But in our work at WMI, we have come to believe that the deeper issue is not simply who inherits, or how assets are transferred.

 

The deeper question is whether families can prepare the next generation to move beyond inheritance itself.

 

To become stewards who understand the weight of legacy, leaders who can renew its purpose, and architects who can translate family success into systems of enduring impact.

 

That is the shift we are here to explore today: from heirs who receive, to system architects who build.

 

Purpose as the Bridge

So how do families actually develop that kind of next generation?

 

Working with our partners at Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, we studied more than 140 family offices across Asia, and spoke in depth with more than twenty families about their lived experience of succession.

 

The findings are not yet published, so this audience has the privilege of hearing some of the early insights first.

 

One finding stood out. Families where rising generations are encouraged to take on leadership and exercise decision-making early are seven times more likely to report that their next generation is prepared. Not twice as likely. Not three times. Seven.

 

That is a striking number. And it points to a simple truth: successors do not become prepared by observing leadership. They become prepared by exercising it.

 

But this is where many families face a practical difficulty. Sharing leadership in the operating business is often hard. The business may not be ready. The next generation may not be ready. The timing may not be right. So families wait. Years pass. And readiness remains just beyond reach.

 

What we see again and again is that families who break this pattern often begin somewhere else. They begin in the spaces where purpose is made practical: in philanthropy, in the family foundation, in impact investing, or in the decisions they make together about how capital should serve something larger than themselves.

 

This is consistent with what our earlier research surfaced last year. Philanthropy can be a powerful bridge-builder in succession. It creates a setting where generations can come together around shared values, make real decisions, and practise leadership in ways that are consequential, but may not immediately existential to the business.

 

That is why we have come to think of purpose as the bridge across generations, and philanthropy as one of the first places where families learn to cross it.

 

It is often the first table where founders and successors, parents and children, siblings with very different instincts and temperaments, sit together not merely to discuss values, but to act on them.

 

And in doing so, the next generation begins to learn what leadership truly requires: judgement, responsibility, collaboration, and the discipline to turn good intentions into enduring systems of impact.

 

What One Family Showed Us

Let me make this concrete with an example from our research.

 

This was a family with four siblings, each accomplished in a different professional field with quite different personalities. When their father stepped back, they faced a question that many enterprising families eventually face: how does a family this different stay together, decide together, and build together?

 

Their first answer was structural. They created a family office. They set up investment committees. They clarified roles and lines of authority.

 

But structure alone was not enough.

 

They discovered, quite quickly, that they did not yet know how to make decisions together. Difficult conversations would stall. One sibling might withdraw. Another might dominate. The formal machinery was in place, but the relational muscle was not.

 

So they did something that many families avoid. They brought in advisors to facilitate family dialogue. Over several years, the siblings practised the hard work of listening to one another as adults, disagreeing without breaking trust, and making decisions without defaulting to old family patterns.

 

But that work needed somewhere to land. It needed an arena where dialogue could become action. That arena was philanthropy.

 

Through the family’s purposeful work, the foundation became the place where the siblings learned to collaborate in practice. Not as a theory. Not as a workshop exercise. But through real decisions, with real money, directed at real human need.

 

And what is striking is how the family describes itself today. They do not begin with the family office, the governance structure, or the investment portfolio. Philanthropy is something they do together. It is something through which they grow, contribute, and come closer as a family.

 

That is the philanthropy bridge in action.

 

Three Things Purposeful Wealth Does

So what does all of this mean for the conversation we are about to have?

 

The example I just shared illustrates how philanthropy can give families a platform for stewardship formation.

 

What I hope will become clear through today’s conversation is that this can also happen through different pathways but achieving same steward formation.

 

Purpose helps transform inheritance into stewardship. They invite the next generation to ask not only what they have received, but what they are now responsible for building, renewing, and carrying forward.

 

Today, we have three remarkable leaders joining us shortly on their chosen paths.

 

Each of them, in their own way, has chosen not simply to inherit a position, but to design one.

 

Each has used purpose as the bridge between what they received and what they intend to build.

 

Carmen has chosen to embed wellness and sustainability into the core of what she creates, even when the easier path was available.

 

Yi-Xian stepped into an organisation with significant scale and chose to reshape it, not simply grow it.

 

Carissa built her own venture outside the family, and then returned, not merely to take over the business, but to rewire it from within and build an impact portfolio alongside it.

 

Three different paths. One shared instinct.

Each of them is, in their own way, an architect of legacy.

 

I look forward to hearing from them, and I hope you do too.